Various types of simulated combat systems have heretofore been proposed, illustrative of which are those disclosed in U.S. Pat. 3,920,242 granted to William E. Reith on Nov. 18, 1975, U.S. Pat. 4,030,731 granted to Guy Delcayre on Jun. 21, 1977, U.S. Pat. 4,892,303 granted to Gunther Lohre on Jan. 9, 1990, and French Patent Publication 2,589,070 of Apr. 30, 1987. According to these proposals, mechanical switches and electronic apparatus are provided for registering and scoring the performance of persons engaged in sports such as fencing and the like. In some instances, hit-sensing has been essentially mechanical in nature as, for example, by the provision of mechanically-operated switches physically mounted in or on the weapon, such switches operating in response to force imparted to them by the act of striking the target. In others, the system evaluates and displays valid or invalid hits from a succession of slashes, counter slashes, flat blows and thrusts and has valid hit surfaces on parts of the weapons such as the handle, the shell, a foil and/or by a metal mat. In some Instances, a vibration pickup is sensitive to acceleration and to frequency of mechanical vibrations.
In addition to systems employing mechanically-actuated sensors such as mechanical switches and the like, others have been proposed that include electronic circuits such as pulse generators mounted on the person of each combatant, such pulse generators producing pulses of distinctive polarity, form and length which represent physical contact and contribute to identification, verification and scoring.
Systems such as the foregoing have been directed principally to one-on-one contests, principally fencing where scoring valid touches has been facilitated by the absence of multiple adversaries. However, when there is introduced the complexity of multiple adversaries, differing types of targets, discrimination between different parts of the same target, different scenarios, and multiple and differing types of weapons, such prior proposals have not provided for distinction therebetween nor for a variety of parameters that such added complexity requires.